Advanced Reporting

Filak Furlough Tour Update: Hanging out with Morgan State University

The Filak Furlough Tour took a stop at Morgan State University, where we covered a couple of really great topics in two classes. Milton Kent, the professor there, was extremely nice to me after I screwed up the name of his student newspaper in a post I wrote a while back, so I wanted to make it up to him and his crew as best I could.

In one class, we talked about some reporting and writing stuff while in the other, we talked about editing, fact checking and such. It was such a great time that I forgot to grab a screen shot photo for this.

 

Oh, well. You’ll have to take my word that I actually wore a different shirt.

Onward…

MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY – Baltimore, Maryland

THE TOPIC:  We went with a lot of Q and A in  the first class, and we’ve kind of touched on a lot of that already, so we’re going with  the second class a bit more, with the idea of how to edit and what to do.

THE BASICS: There are a couple key things that really help me when I need to edit something.  The first one is particularly helpful when I am trying to edit something I wrote.

Write, get the heck away from it, come back,  put on my “editor’s hat” and then go to work.

Editing right after you write something doesn’t tend to work that well in a lot of cases, particularly because you figure if you wrote it,  you probably figured it was right in the first place. It’s also hard to edit right after you wrote it, at least it is for me,  because my  mind kind of  “fills in” stuff that’s not there because I knew what I meant when I wrote it. That makes it harder to do a true word-by-word edit.

Getting away from the piece for a while can help you mentally reboot and come back at it with a fresh set of eyes. I also like to pretend a bit that this came from someone else, so I can be like, “OK, what the fresh hell is this?” Like most things when you’re working with writing and editing, you find little ways to make things  work for you. Once you find them, stick with them.

A couple other tips I liked to use:

ASSUME EVERYTHING IS WRONG:  One of the easiest ways to get something wrong is to assume everything is right and then  only check on things  that appear wrong. It’s a pretty  standard thing  editors who are strapped for time do. Editors who work with high-end pros a lot also tend to go this route, because  you expect stuff to be right if the person is a high-end pro.

Me? I work with a lot of students and I’ve read a lot of things that, while outlandish, tend to be true. I’ve also read stuff that seemed to be logical, only to find the kids made it up. This kind of weird confluence of experiences has put me in t he position where I just assume everything is wrong and I  have to go about proving it to be accurate.

For example, if a source said,  “I got arrested in  New York in  2004 for a string of burglaries and got sent to Smithton State Prison for 10 years. While I was there, more than 20 people got killed in prisoner on  prisoner violence.” I’ve got a lot to look at:

  • Can I prove the guy got  arrested and for what charges?
  • Can I prove the time and place of the arrest and conviction?
  • Can I  prove he went where he said he went and for that amount of time?
  • Can I  prove people got killed there and if so, can I prove the number of deaths?

The same thing is true of simple things like name spellings,  ages, job titles and more. Assume it’s wrong and prove it right.

SINS OF OMISSION ARE VENIAL, SINS OF COMMISSION CAN BE MORTAL: Going along with what we talked about above, if I can’t prove something is right, I’m probably not going to  use it.  This isn’t always possible.  I love going back to this argument in Jay McInerney’s “Bright Lights,  Big City” where the main character (a fact-checker at a magazine) has a discussion with a notoriously sloppy writer:

“Where did you get this about the French government owning a controlling interest in Paramount Pictures?” you say.

“Don’t they? Well, shit. Run a line through that.”

“Your next three paragraphs depend on it.”

“Damn. Who told me that?”

In many cases, however, it’s easy enough to either check the fact and prove it so  you can  keep it in or  check the fact and disprove it so you can cut it. If you can’t do either, it’s better to leave the thing out than to  be wrong.

In writing, we talk about sins of omission and how they can undercut a piece. That’s true, but those sins,  to borrow from my Catholic upbringing, are  venial.  You can be forgiven for not being as complete as you need to be. If you screw up because  you guess wrong, those sins are mortal and you can pretty much kill a piece (or even your  career).

WHEN YOU  SCREW UP, ADMIT IT: Mistakes will happen. I think I make about 353,532 a day, and that’s when I’m only awake for 12 hours. The ones  you put  into the public sphere, however, can really damage your reputation among your peers and your audience.

The one thing I did when I talked to Milton Kent’s class was to apologize for screwing up the name of the school’s publication. I’d already fixed it on the blog weeks earlier and I made an email apology to Milton, but I wanted to let the kids know I was sorry as well. The goal was simple: Be a decent example.

It’s hard to feel OK about screwing up and it’s even harder to fess up when you make a mistake, but people tend to trust you more when you are honest and open about errors. Like most hockey goalies, even the best editors occasionally let one slip past  them. There’s no shame in raising one’s hand and saying, “That’s  on me.”

BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY: What do you think of  the situation with Hasan Minhaj and The New Yorker’s fact check of his comedy? He told some broader truths and after the  piece questioned  his accuracy, he did a video where he “brought the receipts” for what he said in his act. What’s your take on all this?

BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME (plus an update): (When  the student  asked me this, I’d read the New Yorker piece, seen some response pieces and heard the Bill Maher bit on this concept of “emotional truth.” I had not actually seen Minhaj’s response video, which I did explain to the class. After watching it,  I might have changed a couple things (which I’ll touch on after the main answer), but overall, I think the answer itself stands up.)

It felt kind of strange to me that a writer at The New Yorker would spend this kind of reporting capital on fact-checking a comedic routine. There did seem to be some problems with what he said in his comedy and the ramifications of those statements for other people.

(In one  part of his comedy that was examined by the writer, Minhaj mentions that he tried to take a white girl to the prom, only to be turned away at her doorstep because her family didn’t want her in prom pictures with a “brown boy.” According to the story the girl (now woman) and her family caught a lot of online harassment for this, even though it didn’t happen in that way, and she ended up marrying  another “brown boy” later in life. )

When you  make up stuff and it negatively impacts  real people, that’s not good, even if you’re doing it for comedic effect. Minhaj is operating in a world of comedy that’s different from the past days, as comedy and fact have become blurred. That means there is a greater risk when  you  bend the truth or play to broader issues with made-up examples.

Comics have always made up some parts of their act. The late Rodney Dangerfield notoriously made jokes about his wife cheating on him. (“When I come home, the parrot says, ‘Quick! Out the window!'” would be one of those.) While “Fat Albert” in Bill Cosby’s routine was based on a real person, there’s no real proof of people like “Mushmouth” or “Dumb Donald” existing. Richard Pryor, while turning significantly terrible aspects of his life into true comedy, did add elements to his comedy that didn’t exist or were untruthful.

(I’m not linking to any of Pryor’s stuff here, as I don’t want my editors at SAGE to have a heart attack. Speaking of which, one of Pryor’s go-to  bits was about how his father died, which is both truth and fiction. If  you look it up on YouTube, listen with headphones and don’t say I didn’t warn you…)

That said, those tweaks didn’t create significant negative impact for real people. If people had spray painted “WHORE!” on Dangerfield’s wife’s car or she got kicked out of her ladies at church because of his jokes, yeah, that’s something he’d need to answer for. If something terrible happened to “Fat Albert” because of Cosby’s comedy or significant harm happened because of Pryor’s tweaks to the truth,  the same thing applies.

Here were two things that stuck  out with  me about the Minhaj situation:

First, I’m not doubting that he experienced negative things like the ones he mentioned in his comedy  specials. The racism he discusses has been well documented in far too many facets of life for this to be viewed as just lies for the sake of a laugh. (Just like Pryor’s routine about being pulled over  by the cops because someone “looked just like you” probably didn’t happen the way he said it in his routine, I have no doubt he and others experienced that kind of thing and that it was terrible.)

Using humor to draw attention to social inequality and similar issues has merits. I think Minhaj just “punched up” a few of his real examples to make the comedy better while trying to make a bigger point. (I often joke about 12 years of Catholic school and getting battered about by nuns.  We did experience some significant smacking around and some emotional trauma from more than a few people, but it wasn’t all nuns and it wasn’t all the time.) Comedy creates awareness in some significant ways.

Second, I think that doing a deep dive on Minhaj just felt a little shady. There are hundreds of comics out there  talking about “real things” that weren’t 100 percent verified. For the sake of the exercise, go through this Jeff Foxworthy routine about his “Cousin Sherry’s Wedding.”

I have no idea of Foxworthy has a cousin named Sherry. If he does, I have no idea if she actually had a “hurry up wedding” in his Uncle Wayne’s backyard. I also don’t know if she was 8 months pregnant when she got married or, as his mother supposedly said, “That’s the same dress her mother got married in.” I found it funny, regardless.

But we could take apart that routine or a dozen others about his family (“The Clampetts go to Maui” is a classic for this kind of analysis) in the same way The New Yorker went after Minhaj if we wanted. Dare I say, we probably wouldn’t, which probably points toward the racial inequity Minhaj was trying to raise more than anything else.

POST SCRIPT: After I got done with the class, I went to find the video the student referenced that I hadn’t seen. Minhaj does a 21-minute video where he picks apart the article and explains  himself. He does apologize if he led anyone astray with his comedy, which I think is fair. I also think he’s probably more accurate than the New Yorker gave him credit for being. He “brought the receipts” in the form of emails, texts and other supporting evidence.

In most cases, he’s more right than wrong and where he did bend the truth, he made some solid explanations for why he did so. He also pointed to some of the spots where the article’s writer made choices that put a decided slant on how he was coming across. He’s not “emotional truthing” this thing to death, making claims that are untrue but feel like they should be. He realized some of the stuff he said could be a bit further out than maybe he intended initially, but he probably never figured someone would fact check him within an inch of his life.

If nothing else for me, this demonstrated the key principle I always try to push to my students: Before you make a decision, get all the facts you can.

 

 

Get the hell out of the way: How to avoid ruining profile stories by checking your self-importance at the door

In more than a few stops on the Filak Furlough Tour, folks have asked me to talk about news features and personality profiles. These appear to be among the most sought-after pieces in student journalism classes and student newsrooms while simultaneously being among the poorest written.

The openings tend to go one of two ways:

  1. “So and so is not your typical college student…”
  2. The “I… I… I…” approach that sounds like Donald Trump writing his autobiography on a cocaine bender.

With that in mind, I reached into the Wayback Machine and picked out a classic that looks at what to avoid while profiling people, specifically that the story is about the source, not you.

In short, get the hell out of the way and let the readers enjoy the subject.

 

Dear profile writers, Readers don’t give a damn about you, so get out of the story.

Personality profiles are among the best stories journalists will ever write. When reporters get the chance to enter the lives of the rich and famous, the eccentric and reclusive or even the “known but unknown” people around them, they can paint some amazing word pictures that will allow readers to gain incredible insight.

That said, journalists have ruined more than a few of these opportunities because they can’t manage to get out of their own way in telling the story.

Consider this opening of a profile on Woody Harrelson:

It’s a Saturday in June and I’m running on time to meet Woody Harrelson, but one subway delay, one wrong turn, one mother with a double stroller failing to keep pace and clogging the already clogged sidewalks of midtown and I’ll be running behind. Adding to my anxiety: the possibility that I have no voice, not so much as a croak (laryngitis, a bad case).

Brushing past a pair of doormen, I enter the lobby of a residential tower on the southwest tip of Central Park. I beeline for the elevator bank, press the up button, and glance at my phone. Two minutes after the hour. I’m now officially late. My pores open, sweat gushing out. At last, a muted ding as the doors slide apart. I board.

To calm myself, I pull from my bag a sheaf of clippings on Woody. The big takeaway of recent years: He spent his entire adult life cuckoo for cannabis and then, in 2016, gave it up.

In 164 words, the author references herself 12 times. Her subject? Twice.

Profiles recently have suffered from a lot of this kind of masturbatory self-importance, with the writers weaving themselves into the piece as being the one consequential element of the story.

Why?

The fact the writer is present should be considered both obvious and inconsequential: The readers came to this piece because they wanted to learn about the person being profiled, not about the writer.

In short, nobody cares about you. The more you find yourself verbally photo-bombing your way into the story for your own edification or out of sheer laziness, the more annoying you will be to your readers and the less valuable your piece will be.

This point became clear this weekend when several folks online were discussing a recent Adam Sandler profile that kept popping up in our news feeds. The opening wasn’t as self-absorbed as the one for the Harrelson profile, but it was similarly focused and similarly annoying:

We cruised down West Pico in Adam Sandler’s ride, a custom Chevy passenger van tricked out in the style of an orthopedic shoe. The cup holders jangled with suburban odds and ends — a pair of tiny glasses belonging to his daughter; a bottle of Dry-n-Clear ear drops. We were bound for Hillcrest Country Club, the oldest Jewish country club in Los Angeles. “You’re going to like this,” Sandler said. He whipped the van into the valet station. Alongside the row of town cars and coupes, it looked like an airport courtesy shuttle.

Compare this to the opening of Mary Jo Sales’ look at “Jon and Kate Plus 8” co-star Kate Gosselin:

“Nobu, Nobu, I want Nobu!”

Kate Gosselin wants to go to Nobu. She’s got a night away from her eight kids—also her co-stars on the hit reality series Jon & Kate Plus Eight—and a reporter is offering to take her out on the town. “I want sushi!” Kate says, leaning back in an armchair in her suite at the Essex House hotel overlooking Central Park, checking her BlackBerry, popping gum.

But Laurie Goldberg, senior vice president of communications at the Learning Channel, which airs Jon & Kate, doesn’t think Nobu’s such a great idea. Kate cried on the Today show this morning, answering questions about why she’s still wearing her wedding ring (“for them,” she said of her children, sniffling), and this afternoon she told People, “I am so emotionally spent” (from her husband’s behavior, which has included philandering with the daughter of the plastic surgeon who gave Kate her tummy tuck), and so it might not look good for her to be out enjoying herself at a hot spot.

“You’re like a prisoner,” Kate says of her newfound fame, annoyed.

Kate, who in the first season of Jon & Kate, two years ago, appeared on-screen as a dowdy, sweatpants-wearing mama hen, is now looking very much the celebrity—from her tanned, trained body to her curiously asymmetrical blond hairdo, now so iconic as to be the model for a popular Halloween wig.

Her phone rings. “Oh, it’s Kelly”—Ripa, of Live with Regis and Kelly—Kate says, holding up a French-manicured finger, signaling for us all to be silent. She’s going on the show tomorrow morning. She and Kelly gab. “Hiya!”

They both rely on description. They both open with a scene setter. However, while Sales puts the focus on the profile subject (Gosselin), Keiles seems to be writing a piece she wanted to call, “Adam and me.”

Keiles turns the focus on herself once again a few paragraphs after she and Sandler arrive at the club, explaining the story behind the story:

I started chasing Sandler in early 2017. His presence in my own childhood had been mythic — a Jewish cultural influence more imposing than anyone I’d ever learned about in Hebrew school. Thinking about the scope of his career, I was enchanted by the prospect of me, a person of modern and hardly coherent gender, grappling with America’s foremost man-child. I dispatched my editor to email his publicist. At night, from my apartment in Queens, I wondered if Sandman, from his mansion in the Pacific Palisades, was considering my offer.

We followed up. Time was marked by the arrival and deletion of my weekly “Adam Sandler” Google Alert, which detailed a still-persistent comedy career, achieved with infrequent engagement with the press. Soon he mocked me everywhere I went, his face staring down from the subway ads for his latest movie, “Sandy Wexler.” On Netflix, his new stand-up special debuted, and he did the late-night shows. I waited. Months turned to years. And just like that, the Google Alert started to spit out photos from a movie set: Sandler in a louche leather coat and diamond earrings, filming the indie thriller “Uncut Gems.”

Sandler had taken dramatic roles before, most notably in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2002 film, “Punch-Drunk Love.” Then, as now, a question emerged: If he was such a good actor — and he was — then why did he keep making dumb comedies? This was a question I had long since learned that he resented, and in my pursuit, I had been careful to avoid it. Now it seemed the precaution had paid off. By some act of God — or, more likely, behind-the-scenes arm-twisting — we found ourselves together at last, standing in his country club, staring down the gallery of early Hillcrest members.

By this point in the piece, we are learning a lot more about the author than we are about Sandler. We learn about her pursuit of Sandler, Sandler’s influence in her life, how she got an editor to email Sandler, how she wondered if Sandler was considering her offer…

At this point, between the fawning and the overuse of first-person writing, I felt like I was reading a cross between my 14-year-old daughter’s diary and an autobiography Donald Trump wrote while on a coke bender.

Abiding by the theory of “If you’re going through hell, keep going,” I kept reading in hopes of learning something about Sandler that wasn’t tied to the writer.

Nope:

To Sandler, everyone is “bro” or “buddy,” except for me; I was “kid.” Crossing the busy street that cut through the park, he rested a fatherly hand on my shoulder, then yanked it away, as if weighing the optics of touching a young stranger versus letting that same stranger be run over by a car.

Away from the street, we came across a guy absolutely shredding on the erhu. Sandler, who busked in the subway during college, stopped to throw some money in his hat, and I noticed the ease with which $20 seemed to float right out of his hand. I reckoned in that moment that a 20 to Sandler was probably something like $1 to me. Later, using dubious-but-still-plausible figures from CelebrityNetWorth.com, I calculated that his $20 was closer to my one one-thousandth of a cent.

Here’s what I learned:

  • Adam Sandler has a special nickname for the writer. (oooohhh…)
  • Adam Sandler makes more money than the writer. (So cool!)
  • Adam Sandler TOUCHED HER SHOULDER!!!!! (OMG, YOU GUYS!)

I gave up at that point, only cursorily giving a glance at the close of the piece, where Keiles frets about being at a wrap party and wondering if Sandler will remember her. In other words, it ends as it began: All about the writer.

We could continue to beat the dead horse that is this profile, but Keiles is an exemplar, not the cause of this phenomenon. When I groused about a similar approach to a Megan Rapinoe profile, student journalists, professors, former reporters and more all chimed in:

THANK YOU. It’s been so hard teaching our new writers profile writing because they read stuff like this.

I remember this being a MUST DO when I took journalism classes in 1979!

Don’t even get me started with “I caught up with…” and “I sat down with…”

I 100% agree. I hate the inclusion of first person in these things They drive me nuts and ruin the story.

That first person writing drives me crazy!!! I don’t care how you first heard about the person…or how you had to travel to talk to them. You are not the focus of the article!!! It is (EXPLETIVE) lazy.

Based on all of this, consider the following helpful suggestions/concepts:

THE FRAME OF THE MONA LISA THEORY: The Mona Lisa is one of the best-known works of art on Earth. In writing about it for The Independent, John Litchfield called it “the most visited, most written about, most sung about, most parodied work of art in the world.” It serves as a metaphor for everything thought to be the best of anything and it is probably the most recognizable image ever created. I saw it in person about 20 years ago during our honeymoon trip to France. It was smaller than I thought it would be, but it was still compelling in a way I can’t properly articulate.

Now, those of you who have seen it, tell me what the frame on the Mona Lisa looks like.

Chances are, like me, you have no damned idea what that frame looked like. Ask anyone you know who has seen it and they probably have no damned idea what it looked like. Nobody I know walked away from the Louvre saying, “Man, that chick was ugly but the FRAME! Now, THAT was something!” The reason? Nobody gives a damn what the frame looks like. It’s just there to display the artwork in a way that doesn’t detract from it or overshadow it.

Your job as a profile writer is to showcase the subject in a way that other people appreciate it. You display the individual in a fashion that helps the audience members connect to that person. You’re like the frame of the Mona Lisa: Hold up the painting for everyone to enjoy and get the hell out of the way.

SHOW, DON’T TELL: This is Journalism 101, but it bears repeating. If you want to let people know how great a game was, don’t tell them, “This was an awesome game!” Instead, show them what happened so that they independently come to the conclusion of, “Wow, this was an awesome game!” This is true in all kinds of journalistic writing, but it’s especially true in profile writing.

The descriptive nature of narrative storytelling should put your readers into a scene so they feel like they’re viscerally experiencing it for themselves. The distance provided by third-person writing often does this best, because it focuses the readers on the experience as opposed to the writer.

When you rely on first person, you basically are retelling an experience and that focuses the reader on you. Save that for Facebook posts, random blogging and roommates who ask, “So, how was your day?” For profiles, put me next to you at the scene and let me engage the situation as much as you did. That’s fun for both of us.

DON’T BE LAZY: Two of the comments above (one of them rather explicitly) mentioned the idea of how first person allows the writer to be lazy. Leads can be tough to write, so profile writers often resort to some version of, “I caught up with…”

Yeah, no kidding. Otherwise, how would you know whatever it is you are telling me? I’d give anything to hear instead, “I couldn’t catch up with (NAME OF CELEB) because I failed to do enough cardio. Thus, I’ll be making up this entire thing…”

First-person writing has its place: Columns, blogs, personal-participation pieces and several other spots in media. The question always should be, “Do I need to use it to make this piece work or not?” If you can get away without using it, you should aspire to do so for the reasons mentioned above. Consider this opening to a profile on former MLB pitcher John Rocker at the height of Rocker’s fame:

A minivan is rolling slowly down Atlanta’s Route 400, and John
Rocker, driving directly behind it in his blue Chevy Tahoe, is
pissed. “Stupid bitch! Learn to f—ing drive!” he yells. Rocker
honks his horn. Once. Twice. He swerves a lane to the left.
There is a toll booth with a tariff of 50 cents. Rocker tosses
in two quarters. The gate doesn’t rise. He tosses in another
quarter. The gate still doesn’t rise. From behind, a horn
blasts. “F— you!” Rocker yells, flashing his left middle
finger out the window. Finally, after Rocker has thrown in two
dimes and a nickel, the gate rises. Rocker brings up a thick wad
of phlegm. Puuuh! He spits at the machine. “Hate this damn toll.”

With one hand on the wheel, the other gripping a cell phone,
Rocker tears down the highway, weaving through traffic. In 10
minutes he is due to speak at Lockhart Academy, a school for
learning-disabled children. Does Rocker enjoy speaking to
children? “No,” he says, “not really.” But of all things big and
small he hates–New York Mets fans, sore arms, jock itch–the
thing he hates most is traffic. “I have no patience,” he says.
The speedometer reads 72. Rocker, in blue-tinted sunglasses and
a backward baseball cap, is seething. “So many dumb asses don’t
know how to drive in this town,” he says, Billy Joel’s New York
State of Mind humming softly from the radio. “They turn from the
wrong lane. They go 20 miles per hour. It makes me want–Look!
Look at this idiot! I guarantee you she’s a Japanese woman.” A
beige Toyota is jerking from lane to lane. The woman at the
wheel is white. “How bad are Asian women at driving?”

The writer of this piece could have easily started with, “I’m in a car with pitcher John Rocker and I feel like I’m going to die.” Instead, the writing focuses on the subject and the situation. Even when Rocker is directly addressing the writer, first person never enters the mix. Still, we get the picture: John Rocker is a horse’s ass.

No profile is perfect in this regard. Even Gay Talese dropped in a few first-person moments during the legendary profile, “Frank Sinatra has a cold.” However, they are few and far between and limited to points where the writer NEEDS to do this instead of where it’s convenient or the writer can’t think of anything better to do.

Think of using first-person writing in a profile like being forced to take a Friday class that starts at 8 a.m.: It should be an unpleasant experience you only engage in when absolutely necessary. Even then, you should want to move on from it as quickly as possible.

Helpful Hints and Tips on Writing Obituaries (A Throwback Post)

Former basketball coach Bob Knight died this week at the age of 83. His family released the information on Wednesday, noting he had been in poor health for some time.

Actor Matthew Perry died over the weekend at the age of 54. Police reports state he drown in a hot tub at his home.

Both men were well-known and both men accomplished a good amount of incredible things. Knight won three NCAA championships and won more games than anyone in history when he retired. He was a hall of fame inductee and coached the last undefeated NCAA D-I college basketball team (the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers). Perry was an award-winning and Emmy-nominated actor, who had multiple film roles and published a best-selling memoir.

Both men had demons. Knight’s temper was always his undoing, whether it was throwing a chair across the court during a game or choking a player during practice. He was also hostile and belligerent in dealing with almost everything on earth at one time or another. Perry’s drug addiction was well chronicled in his book, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.” Between huge weight swings, rehab and trying to find dozens of opioids each day just to keep himself going, Perry made life extremely difficult on himself and others around him.

These two deaths made me reach back into the Wayback Machine and pull up this throwback post about obituary writing. To write about either without showcasing all of their best and worst aspects would be disingenuous and inaccurate. When we have to write about people who have died, keeping that in mind is crucial:

 

Obituary Writing: Telling truths, not tales, in a reverent recounting of a life

In a discussion among student media advisers, one person noted that obituaries are probably the second-hardest things journalists have to do frequently. (The hardest? Interviewing family members about dead kids.) When a person dies, media outlets often serve as both town criers and official record keepers. They tell us who this person was, what made him or her important and what kind of life this person led. This is a difficult proposition, especially given that people have many facets and the public face of an individual isn’t always how those who knew the person best see him or her. Couple these concerns with the shock and grief the person’s loved ones and friends have experienced in the wake of the death and this has all the makings of a rough journalistic experience.

The New York Times experienced this earlier in the week when it published an obituary on Thomas Monson, the president of the Mormon Church. The Times produced a news obituary that focused on multiple facets of Monson and his affect on the church. This included references to his work to expand the reach and the population of its missionary forces as well as his unwillingness to ordain women and acknowledge same-sex marriages. The obituary drew criticism from many inside the church, leading the obituary editor to defend the choices the paper made in how it covered Monson. (For a sense of comparison, here is the official obituary/notification of death that the church itself wrote for Monson.)

You will likely find yourself writing an obituary at some point in time if you go into a news-related field.  Some of my favorite stories have been obituaries, including one I did on a professor who was stricken by polio shortly after he was married in the 1950s. I interviewed his wife, who was so generous with her recollections that I was really upset when we had to cut the hell out of the piece to make it fit the space we had for it. Still, she loved it and sent me a card thanking me for my time.

Some of my most painful stories have also been obituaries. The one that comes to mind is one I wrote about a 4-year-old boy who died of complications from AIDS. His mother, his father and one of his siblings also had AIDS at a time in which the illness brought you an almost immediate death sentence and status as a societal pariah. I spoke to the mother on the phone multiple times that night, including once around my deadline when she called me sobbing. Word about the 4-year-old’s death had become public knowledge and thus she was told that her older son, who did not have AIDS, would not be allowed to return to his daycare school. Other things, including some really bad choices by my editor, made for a truly horrific overall situation in which the woman called me up after the piece I co-wrote ran and told me what a miserable human being I was. She told me the boy’s father was so distraught by what we published that he would not leave the house to mourn his own son and that she held me responsible for that. Like I said, these things can be painful.

No matter the situation, there are some things you need to keep in mind when you are writing obituaries:

  • Don’t dodge the tough stuff: Your job as a journalist is to provide an objective, fair and balanced recounting of a person’s life. The Times’ editor makes a good point in noting that the paper’s job is to recount the person’s life, not to pay tribute or to serve as a eulogist. This means that you have to tell the story, however pleasant or unpleasant that might be. One of my favorite moments of honesty came from hockey legend Gordie Howe who was recalling the tight-fisted, cheap-as-heck former owner of the Detroit Red Wings:

    “I was a pallbearer for Jack,” says Howe. “We were all in the limousine, on the way to the cemetery, and everyone was saying something nice, toasting him. Then finally one of the pallbearers said, `I played for him, and he was a miserable sonofabitch. Now he’s … a dead, miserable sonofabitch.’”

    It’s not your fault if the person got arrested for something or treated people poorly. If these things are in the public record and they are a large part of how someone was known, you can’t just dodge them because you feel weird. Check out the Times’ obituary on Richard Nixon and you’ll notice that Watergate makes the headline and the lead. As much as that was likely unpleasant for the people who were closest to Nixon, it was a central point of his life and needed to be discussed. In short, don’t smooth off the rough edges because you are worried about how other people might feel. Tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may.

 

  • Avoid euphemisms: This goes back to the first point about being a journalist. You don’t want to soften the language or use euphemisms. People don’t “pass on” or “expire.” NFL quarterbacks pass and magazine subscriptions expire. People die. Also, unless you can prove it, don’t tell your readers that the person is “among the angels” or “resting in the arms of Jesus.” (Both of these euphemisms ended up in obituaries I edited at one point or another. They obviously didn’t make it to publication.) Say what you know for sure: The person died.

 

  • Double down on accuracy efforts: People who are reading obituaries about loved ones and friends are already on edge, so the last thing you want to do is tick them off by screwing up an obituary. I don’t know if this was just a matter of newspaper lore or if it was a real thing, but I was told more than once at a paper where I worked that there were only two things that would get us to “stop the presses:” 1) we printed the wrong lottery numbers and 2) we screwed up an obituary.
    True or not, the point was clear to me: Don’t screw up an obituary.
    Go back through your piece before you put it out for public consumption and check proper nouns for spelling and accuracy. Do the math yourself when it comes to the age (date of birth subtracted from date of death) and review each fact you possess to make sure you are sure about each one. If you need to make an extra call or something to verify information, do it. It’s better to be slightly annoying than wrong.

 

  • Accuracy cuts both ways: As much as you need to be accurate for the sake of the family, you also need to be accurate for the sake of the public record. This means verifying key information in the obituary before publishing it. The person who died might told family and friends about winning a medal during World War II or graduating at the top of her class at Harvard Law School. These could be accurate pieces of information or they could be tall tales meant to impress people. Before you publish things that could be factually inaccurate, you need to be sure you feel confident in your sourcing.
    Common sense dictates that you shouldn’t be shaking the family down for evidence on certain things (“OK, you say she liked to knit. Now, how do we KNOW she REALLY liked knitting? Do you have some sort of support for that?”) but you should try to verify fact-based elements with as many people as possible or check the information against publicly available information. Don’t get snowed by legends and myths. Publish only what you know for sure.

 

  • Don’t take things personally: Calling family, friends and colleagues of someone who just died can be really awkward and difficult for you as a reporter. Interviews with these people can be hard on them as well as hard on you. I found that when I did obituaries, I got one of three responses from people that I contacted:
    1. The source told me, “I’m sorry, but I really just can’t talk about this right now.” At that point, I apologized for intruding upon the person’s grief and left that person alone.
    2. The source is a fount of information and wanted to tell me EVERYTHING about the dead person. I found that for some of them, it was cathartic to share and eulogize and commemorate. It was like I was a new person in their circle of grief and they wanted to make sure I knew exactly why the person who died was someone worth knowing.
    3. The source was like a wounded animal and I made the mistake of sticking my hand where it didn’t belong. I have been called a vulture, a scumbag and other words I’ve been asked to avoid posting on this blog. One person even told me, “Your mother didn’t raise you right” because I had the audacity to make this phone call. I apologized profusely and once I hung up, I needed a couple minutes to shake it off. I knew it wasn’t my fault but it wasn’t easy either.

Your goal in an obituary is always to be respectful and decent while still retaining your journalistic sensibilities. It’s a fine line to walk, but if you do an obituary well, you will tell an interesting story about someone who had an impact on the world in some way. I like to think a story about this person who died should be good enough to make people wish they’d known that person while he or she was alive.

An Update on The Filak Furlough Tour: Hanging out with William Paterson University

QUICK UPDATE: The “Filak Furlough T-shirts” are live and have a few days left on their ordering clock. If you want to order one, here’s the link and here are the shirts:

Thanks to about a dozen random things, I fell behind a bit on the Furlough Tour updates. Part of it was we did a lot of stops in a short period of time and the other part of it was catching up with work after being furloughed. There’s something weird about having work pile up while you’re not allowed to touch said work. I think this is what vacations must be like for normal people…

In any case, it’s good to be back and we’re starting off on the East Coast with…

William Paterson University – Wayne, NJ

I think I was happy here because I didn’t see the kid wearing the Yankees sweatshirt until after the photo was taken. 🙂

 

THE TOPIC: What kinds of stories are out there and how do we find them?

THE BASICS: The students had some great story ideas when it came to things going on around them at the school. The one that sticks in my mind is about a woman who lives on or around campus and she takes care of stray cats that are around the area. (It was more complicated than that, but that’s the gist of what my age-addled brain can remember at this point.)

The other students had ideas that percolated from things they had seen every day as well, which is a pretty good way to go about finding stories: Open the aperture of your mind and look at the things going on around you as potential story ideas. In that way, if something is of interest to you, it’s probably going to be of interest to other people.

HELPFUL LINKS:

BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY: One of the key issues that the person working on the cat story brought up was how best to make sure that she wasn’t exploiting the woman or portraying her in a way that might be offensive to her. How can a journalist tell a story about someone like this without potentially damaging that person?

BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME: This is a good sign of a good reporter who is growing into their role in the business. Far too often, we think, “Get the story!” instead of “How can we do this in a way that causes the least amount of damage?” In many cases, we learn a lot by screwing up in that way, but it’s so much better for everyone concerned if we can avoid screwing that up in the first place.

One of the key things to do is to spend time with the source and get a handle on how that person feels about the story, the concept and the approach you want to take. In some cases, like crime or politics, this isn’t really a thing, in that the facts and the public’s right to know might outweigh how a criminal or politician would like to be portrayed. However, in the case of a feature story on a private individual who has no duty to be in the public eye, it’s important to make sure you think about these things.

If your approach and the person’s general sense of the situation match up well, it’s easier to move forward. If they don’t, you can either try to explain why you’re doing what you’re doing to that source, or you can see if that person’s thoughts should reshape your approach to the content.

At the end of the day, you want to consider if the juice is worth the squeeze when it comes to doing the story and the potential collateral damage that could come with it.

NEXT STOP: Iowa State.

Three tips to make the editing process more valuable (A throwback post)

In visiting multiple newsrooms and various classrooms through the Filak Furlough tour, one question that popped up a bit was how to get people to “do it right” when it came to writing stories. Editors spoke of frustration due to writers who wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t learn or otherwise made life vexing for the editors.

What was absent in this situation, however, were the writers, many of whom I would imagine had a completely opposite view of the situation. If I had to wager, I’d argue that they probably felt editors were demanding, picky or otherwise vexing.

In digging back for a Throwback Thursday post, I found this one that might be helpful to both sides: kind of a “peace with honor” thing that might make life easier in understanding how editing should work.

 

 

The battle of wills between writers and editors: Three tips to make the editing process more valuable

If you read Ruth Reichl’s column about her editor, Susan Kamil, you can get the idea of how a good editor can make all the difference. In reflecting on Kamil after her recent death, Reichl offered a wonderful assessment of her friend, colleague and editor in a way that is both honest and honorific.

I have been both the editor and the edit-ee throughout my life and I have found neither of them are a bowl of cherries. As the person being edited, I find myself vacillating between the desire to be told how awesome I am and the need to be told where I really screwed up. It’s almost a borderline disorder of personality: When someone tells me I’m perfect, I push back by saying, “No, I NEED feedback so I can improve before people who read the published version rip me to shreds.” When someone heaps “helpful suggestions” upon me, I often feel like saying, “OK, screw you and everyone who looks like you.”

Sounds dumb? Yep, but I bet I’m not the only one in that boat.

As an editor, the frustration is just as palpable: I can see what needs to happen so I’m pulling in one direction. However, the writer keeps thinking, “What the hell does this chucklehead know?” Having to edit strong-willed people has on occasion led to some of my worst moments, including once telling a student, “I’ve taken (bowel movements) that I would be more proud of than I would be of this lead.” It was like, “If you would just be reasonable and see it MY WAY, we’d get done with this a lot faster and better.”

Eventually, I found more equilibrium in the relationship. It also helped when I started finding editors who worked with me in a way that made sense to me. (As Harvey Spector says in “Suits,” you don’t want to play the case. You want to play the person.) It has gotten to a point where each book I do, I ask if Jim Kelly (the former journalist, not the football player) is available to be my copy editor. Otherwise, can we wait on this?

For those of you who don’t get the chance to pick your poison… er… editor… and for those editors who still don’t get why the writers suck at this, consider a few helpful hints that might make the relationship make more sense:

  • You’re both right, but in different ways: In most cases, reporters are the experts on their stories. They were in the field, they’ve done the research, they have the interviews and they collected additional information. When it comes to the “who did what to whom” elements of the story, the reporters are the experts on everything, which is why they can feel frustrated when an editor starts putzing around with their copy.
    Conversely, the editors are the experts on what the readers are seeing, what they need to see and where the gaps exist in the stories they are editing. The reporters are hip-deep in the content and thus sometimes have trouble seeing the forest through the trees. The editors come to the content with fresh eyes, a general interest in the topic and limited background on what’s going on. That’s exactly how the readers will see it, so it pays to have the editors poking around and changing stuff.
    Much like every other situation in life, if multiple people are involved in a collective task, the goal is to play to each person’s strength and away from each person’s weakness. Thus, the editor should get some leeway in terms of changing things that get in the way of the readers’ understanding of the content while the reporter should get more control over the general gist of the story.
  • You must be able to explain why: I often tell my students that little kids are amazing because they always want to understand what’s going on around them. This is why a 4-year-old’s favorite question is “Why?” They want to figure out how something works, how come something is the way it is and what reasons you have for doing something. It’s an innate element of their being.
    Eventually we stop asking those questions, either because we start to figure things out on our own or for fear that an adult might push us into traffic out of frustration. That doesn’t mean we still don’t have those questions, but rather, we stop verbalizing them, so instead of getting decent answers to our concerns, we simply have to stew in our own displeasure.
    As a writer or an editor, the goal of every decision you make should be to have a reason for whatever it is you are doing. Then, you need to be able to verbalize it in a clear and concise fashion for anyone who might need to know. For example, if you used a narrative lead on your story instead of a standard inverted-pyramid lead, your editor might ask, “Why does it take me three paragraphs to get to the point of the story?” If you have a good reason, like “I wanted to set up the lead more as a nut graf, because I keep weaving this guy in the opening back into the story as a thread,” your editor might see things the way you do and let it sit. If you have the “I just wanted to mix it up” or the dreaded “I dunno” answer, you’re probably not going to have things work out your way.
    The same thing is true for an editor: If you want to change something, have a reason to do so. Also, it helps to ask the “why” question of the writer before you decide to make that change. It shows an interest in what the writer has done, and it provides you an opportunity to reconsider your change. As noted earlier, you’re both going to have strengths and weaknesses, so play to the strengths and explain why you think your position is stronger. If you have established trust with the writer, the writer should give you some leeway on this. If not, you need to start establishing trust, like, yesterday.
  • The goal is the same: In the end, the thing you both need to understand is that you both want the same thing: the best possible product. In some cases, this can be inordinately frustrating because you can’t fully agree on what that “best possible product” actually is. In addition, you might have different ways to get there.
    This is where trust comes in and you both need to make a decision about the value of this relationship. In one of the most frustrating relationships of my life, my doctoral adviser and I butted heads constantly on the editing of my dissertation. I kept pushing for the “good enough” version of things and she kept pushing for the “best possible” version of things. It took a long time for me to admit she was right, but she was. Her goal was my goal, even when I couldn’t see it: Write a piece that was going to be easy to defend and that would help me complete my degree.
    At the end of the day, if you are both honest with yourselves and care about the outcome, you will have the best interest of your readers in mind. That means you’ll care less about getting your way or making your changes than you will making sure the reader gets a good, strong, clear and valuable story.
    If that’s not the case, and you just want to win, everyone involved is going to lose.

Filak Furlough Tour Update: Hanging Out With The University of Central Missouri (Part II)

The Filak Furlough trip to the University of Central Missouri really needed a two-parter, in part because there were really two phases to this: The “dude-at-podium” part that we talked about on Monday and the more relaxed part, where I got to hang out with the staff of The Muleskinner.

I have always loved student media, even when student media didn’t really seem to love me. To understand why would take too long to explain, but I believe in the idea that you really can make a significant difference in the lives of many people if you are a student journalist. I also believe that there’s no better place to learn your craft than in a student newsroom that reeks of old pizza, sweaty anxiety and deadline fever.

Let’s get going…

University of Central Missouri – Warrensburg, MO

This is my happy place: In a student newsroom, talking shop with some great kids and critiquing a paper. Photo courtesy of Mingzhu Zhu, The Muleskinner.

THE TOPIC: Newspaper critique and editorial leadership discussion.

THE BASICS: One of the most important things I wanted the students (and you all) to know is that any critique I do is meant to look at things from a different perspective and help people get better. Yes, there might be some criticism in there, but it’s not about the workers. It’s about the work. As I said in the critique, “I have said to someone before, ‘That’s a terrible lead.’ but I’ve never said, “That’s a terrible lead and your haircut is even worse.'” The first one, albeit harsh, is about the work. The second one is a mean personal attack and I won’t ever go there.

So here we go…

A lot of what I talk about in critiques is based on critical thinking, particularly in terms of what people choose to cover and what they don’t choose to cover. In addition, I push a bit on the idea of how much space is dedicated to what kinds of things.

For example, we were talking about front page of the paper:

What I saw immediately was this amazing, locally drawn illustration that relates to the start of UCM’s welcome week. It was near the bottom of the page, while a photo of a ribbon-cutting on an aviation center that happened three weeks earlier was about the same size and near the top of the page. I asked why they went this route.

The answers were good in some cases: It’s a big project ($5.1 million), the area is really plugged into aviation and it made UCM the only university in the state to have its own public-use airport. These were all smart reasons for putting this story out front and getting it some major attention. On the down side, the image is well shot, but relatively common for a ribbon cutting  and its also really old news. This is one of those moments where you might think, “How can I get the newsy stuff in the right spot while highlighting some very cool things that are unique to my publication?”

The suggestion I had was to push the illustration up near the top and package it as a centerpiece across the 4 or 4.5 columns of space available there, adding a little more information layering about the first week of school. Then you can run the airport thing down a 2 or 1.5 column rail that keeps the headline above the fold (kind of like what you have with the story in pink) and then strip the research story across the bottom, with the headline spanning all six columns and having the graphic breakout box in the last 1.5 columns of space next to the text.

If the airport story was really so important as to demand more attention, you could flip the whole concept a bit: Make a couple phone calls to airport folk to find out how things are going and give the story a quick refresh. Then, strip the airport story across the top, with a headline across all six columns, put the text below it across four columns and run the art in a two-column set up in the strip. Then centerpiece the illustration and run the research thing like you have it, but just lower on the page. Either way, you get more emphasis on one thing on the page that can really draw people’s attention: The local artwork.

We also talked about the arts page, which features reviews of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” My question was, again, why this and why now? The students mentioned that these were pretty big movies and they had people who like writing movie reviews. I agreed  that they were big, but they were big three or four months earlier. Also, people could get this kind of thing anywhere, whereas readers could only get info about UCM from the Muleskinner. When it came to the paper, they got like one, 8-page edition per month to cover the entirety of the school, so is it a great idea to give away 1/8th of that space in this way?

This isn’t to say there wasn’t great content in this paper, as there clearly was. I loved the photos of the basketball team, the artwork out front, the features related to their sports fans and more. Even the BarbiHeimer page had a great local illustration on it. This isn’t about the idea of something being good or bad, but rather a question of asking why we’re doing what we’re doing. If you have good reasons for doing something, great. Do it. If you don’t, reconsider.

We also talked about life on staff and how people tend to burn out over time. The EIC was particularly stressed and I can understand why. The head editor has to deal with all the content, the people, the readers, the budget stuff, the administrators and more. This kind of “face of the franchise” stuff is precisely why I never wanted to be a chair, a dean or a chancellor. Well, that and I’d have to dress differently…

Rather than cover all that here, I’m providing some links to a few pieces we did back in the day about stress, burnout and college media.

In Part III, I have a link to the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which allows you to test yourself for burnout in three key categories. If you want to do that and then want a copy of the decoder sheet, just hit me up via the contact page.

BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY: (This one came from the social media director Mingzhu Zhu, who was nice enough to share some photos of the events and make the promotional piece I put up on the previous post. She is a heck of a great media kid and any place out there would be lucky to have her after graduation.) I noticed that you’re only really on Twitter/X and LinkedIn for social media. Why are you using only those two platforms?

BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME: I’m really only on those platforms (plus Facebook) because that’s where my audience is and that’s where I can spend the most time effectively.

Knowing your audience and what they use is a key component of being effective on social media. I know I have a lot of current and former students on LinkedIn, who still read my stuff and like to learn from it. I know that I have both a broad reach on my regular Facebook profile and access to teacher-specific groups like Teachapalooza on Facebook.

Twitter/X is becoming more of a wildcard, and I’ve started to shift over to BlueSky now (same handle: @DoctorOfPaper), but the idea is that I still have solid connections there, and using that platform is a good way to share headlines and links. I’m able to track blog traffic to see where people come from and who shows up a lot. That helps me keep my focus on specific targets.

Also, these platforms rely heavily on text-based sharing, which is kind of my bread and butter. I’m not on Instagram that much because my images tend to suck and most of what we do here isn’t visual. I’m also not on TikTok, as it’s more video driven and meant for entertainment in a lot of ways, so it’s not something that fits my niche. Same thing with YouTube: I’m not doing vlogging.

Finally, I believe in making sure that I’m keeping an active presence on whatever social media channels I use. At a certain point, picking out too many channels will lead to a weaker overall social media presence across all of them. Even more, I don’t want to spend an inordinate amount of time chasing five people across four platforms. There’s a law of diminishing returns when you start pouring tons of time into the social media landscape, so a more targeted approach that yields richer returns is what I feel is best for me and the folks who pay attention to me.

SPECIAL THANKS: I wanted to really thank the staff of The Muleskinner for making me feel like a part of the family. I do miss a lot of the best of student media and these folks really do represent the best of us:

ONE LAST THING: I have been working on the bats for people and have been making relatively steady progress. I not only managed to get the bat for UCM done before I got there, I managed to apply my extremely limited art skills and get a relatively decent recreation of their mule mascot:

I’m also waiting for mail supplies for the folks that got done earlier. We’re getting there…

More on the tour soon.

Vince (a.k.a. The Doctor of Paper)

Filak Furlough Tour Update: Hanging Out With The University of Central Missouri (Part I)

This week’s stop along the Filak Furlough Tour was an actual stop, meaning Amy and I packed up the truck and drove to Warrensburg, Missouri to visit the University of Central Missouri. Julie Lewis is the adviser of The Muleskinner, the student newspaper down there, and arranged for me to meet with her kids.

Initially, it was going to be a “get-to-know-ya” session where I did some newspaper critiquing and hung out in the newsroom. Then, she mentioned something about talking to high school kids and advisers, which was fine.

Then, I got this promo piece she was sending around to drum up attention for the event:

Great… No pressure… In any case, welcome to the next stop on the tour:

University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO

I’m apparently channeling my “Karate Kid” training to help the students learn something important. Photo courtesy of Ellie Whitesell, UCM Muleskinner

THE TOPIC: Given the current state of journalism, what does it take to be good at this job?

THE BASICS: I know we’re all taking a beating these days in the field of journalism, and I’m sure many students have family members wondering why the heck they’re going into this field in the first place. I believe in the future of journalism in the same way I believe in the future of pretty much anything: If it’s done well, provides a valuable service and connects with people who need it, things will be fine.

To help the students and advisers get a better handle on what I meant by that, here are four things I talked about that I thought could help journalists thrive in today’s media ecosystem:

Know Your Audience: One of the biggest things that we have seen over the past ten or fifteen years is a shift in how journalists need to conceive of their craft. Back when I was in school, we learned the 5Ws and the 1H, a handful of newsvalues and were told, “Get this into your story and everything will work out fine.”

The approach we took was one of “I, as journalist, want to tell you, the fawning mass of readers, what you need to hear from me.” That worked out pretty well for a long time, when we had one or two newspapers that served a certain area and three or four TV stations that did the same. If you’re the only game in town, you can set the rules as you see fit and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.

Today, we have more choices than ever before when it comes to what we get from myriad media outlets. The sheer volume of content we get on a minute by minute basis could stun a team of oxen in its tracks. People can pick and choose as they see fit, and we need to acknowledge that and adapt to it.

To that end, it’s more important than ever to know who is out there, what they need to know and how we can best give it to them. It isn’t about “I want to tell you something” anymore, but rather, “What do you want to know and how can I get it to you in a way that you’ll understand it?”

Spend time getting to know the people who you want to reach and you’ll do much better at reaching them.

 

Be Nosy: A lot of journalist bandy about the concepts of “deep dive stories” or “critical thinking paradigms” which all sound really serious and important. At the heart of these things, however, is a simple concept: Be nosy.

A teacher once asked me if I could teach her kids to be nosy, which I said I wasn’t sure about. After all, you’re either the kind of person that noses around in stuff or you’re not. And once you have that nosy gene, it’s really hard to shut it off. As a reporter, I learned how to read things on people’s desks upside down so I could get news scoops. Today, my boss is constantly covering things up on his desk when I show up in his office, because I still do that.

What I can say is that we all start off in life with a sense of wonder. If you think about it, what’s a 4-year-old’s favorite question? WHY! They are constantly trying to figure out why something is the way it is, how something works, what someone is doing and why they’re doing it.

Yes, this can get annoying after a while and you probably want to give the kid a fork and tell them to go play with the toaster, but that instinct they have is one of just pure nosiness.

Somewhere along the way, we lose that sense of wonder. Maybe it’s when we’re in middle school and teachers get exasperated with us. Maybe it’s in high school when it’s no longer cool to ask questions in class. I don’t know.

What I do know is that the way to get back to great journalism that is fun, valuable and engaging is to find that sense of wonder again. We have to find joy and passion in the idea of trying to learn something because we are just so darned curious. Once we learn that thing, we can’t wait to share it with everyone else around us. That can lead to a great number of fantastic stories.

 

Become a Non-Denominational Skeptic: This is a simple idea that has become much harder to do these days because everyone seems ready to jump all over you if you are perceived to be on the “wrong side” of an issue.

The goal of journalism is to report and reporting requires that we dig into a situation and we ask a lot of questions, many of which may seem rude or problematic to people who don’t like the questions we ask. I can’t tell you the number of times someone took offense to a question I asked, calling me a vulture or a scumbag or other things I won’t repeat here. I even remember someone once telling me, “Your mother didn’t raise you right if you think this is appropriate.”

Ouch.

Granted, sometimes I wasn’t exactly the most skilled interviewer and I tended to cover a lot of crime and such, so there wasn’t always a good way to ask a particular question. That said, in most cases, people were taking umbrage at the idea that I wasn’t just taking their word at face value.

Being a non-denominational skeptic means doing exactly that, regardless of the source or the topic. It could be your best friend or your worst enemy. It could be a topic you totally support or it could be a topic that you would spend a lifetime opposing voraciously.

It doesn’t matter. Either way, you should be skeptical until you are given enough context, sourcing or support to make you believe the information at hand.

This isn’t always easy and it isn’t always fun, but it’s what we signed up for as journalists.

 

Be Brave: It is so easy these days to be afraid of so many things. Thanks to social media and arm chair warriors, any single thing we do can be dissected, analyzed, criticized and more. We are constantly at a heightened tension that a mistake, a joke, a misunderstanding or more could lead to a firestorm of controversy and irreparably harm us.

It’s a scary time to be in the public eye, particularly if we’re digging around on something that someone doesn’t want us digging around on.

It’s easy to be brave when there’s nothing to fear. It’s easy to write stories when they bandwagon on trendy topics or that hammer on people, places or things that are extremely unpopular. What’s harder is doing the right thing, regardless of the odds or the enemy.

I go back to this story that Baseball Commissioner Happy Chandler once told about his decision to integrate baseball, despite having owners voting 15-1 not to. He said, “I’m going to have to meet my maker some day and if he asks me why I didn’t let (Jackie Robinson) play, and I say because he’s black, well, I don’t think that’ll be a satisfactory answer.” Chandler was not a perfect man by any means, but when it came time to put up or shut up, he was brave.

If each of us can do just a little bit of that, I think journalism will be just fine.

BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY (PART I): Has there ever been a time where you struggled to maintain journalistic objectivity? And, if so, how did you go about handling that story?/ How do you, as a journalist, stay unbiased on hot topics that you may a strong opinion towards?

BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME (PART I): I try to practice what I preach in terms of being a non-denominational skeptic when it comes to interviewing people or listening to what they have to say about a topic. I tend not to think of my approach like a light switch, where I’m either on or off, either for or against something.

Instead, I like to think of it like a door. It can be wide open or totally closed, but it can also be partially open to a variety of degrees. To that end, I like to think that I’m giving people at least a chance to convince me of something before I totally slam the door on them.

Granted, there are times where it’s easier to keep the door really open, like when two equally qualified candidates are running for political office. I’ll keep that door open on both of their thought  processes, regardless of how I personally feel about their positions on taxes, land use or how Diet Pepsi doesn’t taste like melted tin and cat urine. Keeping that door open allows me to show both people to my readers effectively.

It’s a lot harder, and thus a lot more narrow of an opening if I’m talking to a white supremacist leader, for example. That door is pretty much closed, but I have to at least keep it open to some degree.

The door is open in regard to things like free speech: As long as you’re not inciting imminent lawless action, you can publicly say whatever you want as part of a protest on a city street corner, so if we’re talking about that, the door needs to stay open because that’s an important truism.

That said, I’ve had to listen to some pretty vile stuff over the years due to these folks making the news and me having to interview them, and I’m not putting up with that crap. So, when he starts veering into “the superiority of the white race….” yeah, that door’s getting slammed pretty damned quick and hard.

Those are obviously the extreme examples, but the point is, you can’t reflexively close a door on a topic just because you don’t like it. If you do, you might miss something important or fail to serve your audience appropriately.

BEST QUESTION OF THE DAY (PART II): What do you feel is the biggest benefit that your books have brought to campuses that other books haven’t?

BEST ANSWER I HAD AT THE TIME (PART II): I’m glad someone out there who is actually reading my books thinks there’s some benefit to them, so that was nice to find out. Usually the three questions students ask about my books are:

  1. How much does this cost?
  2. Do I actually have to read it to pass this class?
  3. Can I sell it back at the end of the semester?

If I had to boil down my books to a simple concept, I’d say I try to treat students like they’re actually people, instead of drones who are lucky to be fed the knowledge I have gathered. I have found that tone goes a long way in terms of how much I like what I’m reading.

For example, there is a textbook that is pretty much the only game in town for a specialized area of journalism and I refuse to use it because it just feels so arrogant in its tone. It’s like, “I, the author, am a golden GOD and you are fortunate to be in my presence to garner the knowledge I feel you are capable of receiving, given your limited mental capacity.”

When I started writing the books, I thought back to the people I enjoyed reading. I loved how certain columnists would put me in a place and time by writing like we were just equals, sitting together, having a chat. I loved how authors would weave humor into moments of a book that helped me laugh and helped me remember things. I really loved it when writers would take a complex topic and boil it down to some simple, memorable elements for me, without making me feel inferior for not knowing the stuff to begin with.

Whether I’m successful or not is in the eyes of the readers, but that’s what I’m trying to do.

NEXT STOP: Part II of the visit to UCM.

Another addition to the “club” of campus shootings, 5 injured at Morgan State University

The front page of The Spokesman, Morgan State University’s student newspaper, after someone shot five people during a homecoming event overnight. I’m not sure if it’s irony, coincidence or just a damn shame that the publication covered an event aimed at stanching gun violence two days earlier (see the recent stories rail).

I woke up to a news alert in my email to find that Morgan State University joined “a club we don’t want to be a member of and we don’t want any more members in it,” to quote a friend who survived a mass shooting on a college campus. Five people were shot overnight during a homecoming event at the Baltimore-area institution. The injuries are not life-threatening, according to officials, and the shooter hasn’t been captured.

The first stop on the Filak Furlough Tour covered the issue of crime, chaos and disasters. We discussed how to cover them and what kinds of things you need to do to keep yourself safe, both mentally and physically. In covering this topic, I’ve mentioned before the discussion I had with my friend Kelly Furnas, who was the adviser of the student newspaper at Virginia Tech when a mass shooting took the lives of 32 innocent people on that campus.

When I was able to secure him for a presentation at a college media convention less than a year after that event, it was a huge “get” because he and his editorial staff had experienced something so rare and mystifying that we all were desperate to hear what he had to say. He told me later that as he continued to do the “convention circuit,” he went from being an anomaly to being one of an increasingly growing group of people who had dealt with this. His sessions, he said, went from being a “here’s what happened” to a “here’s how you cover it when it happens to you.”

The students at The Spokesman did a good job of strong journalism on this one, and I’d argue they were stronger than the national outlets who somehow managed to not get the last names of sources or time elements into their stories. The Spokesman promised additional updates as more information becomes available and I’m sure by the time authorities capture this person, the big-wig media will have moved on to something else. Meanwhile, the folks at Morgan State will be left to pick up the pieces of their shattered sense of security.

Please keep an eye on this story via The Spokesman and think about those kids on that campus. They need to know we are watching and that we care.

The Filak Furlough Tour posts will continue next week.

Vince (a.k.a The Doctor of Paper)

EDITOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this called the paper “The Spectator” for reasons past my understanding. I think I had a brain glitch. Thanks to the folks at The Spokesman for bring it to my attention. You deserved better from me on this. Keep doing great work. –VFF

 

 

The best advice ever when it comes to getting an interview from an Emmy-award winning journalist. (A Throwback post)

As we start the unit on interviewing in my classes, a lot of students are getting nervous about talking to people. I like to blame it on a lot of things like COVID’s push to make everything a distance discussion, this generation’s over-reliance on digital communication and a general sense of fear that people will say no.

Truth be told, I was always fearful of calling people up or walking up to people for basic interviews. Strangely enough, I never had a problem walking past a burning building or stepping over something dead to ask a firefighter or a cop, “So, what happened here?” I think the adrenaline of the moment helped push me past my socially awkward nature.

In any case, getting what you need often comes down to knowing who can give it to you. Bothering people for an interview, a set of data or even a ride in a nuclear sub can be arduous, but when it comes to making it happen, this throwback post has some pretty good advice:

 

“Don’t Take No From Someone Who Isn’t Empowered To Say Yes”

My friend Allison used the quote in the headline this weekend when we were teaching her daughter/my goddaughter how to negotiate for better prices at a flea market in South Haven, Michigan. It turned out to be a golden bit of advice she learned from Peter Greenberg, a Emmy-award-winning journalist who was talking to the students at our old college newspaper.

Here’s the story as relayed by Allison (Greenberg himself recalled this story during a guest appearance on the “Destination Everywhere” Podcast):

Greenberg was explaining how to get an important story and how to persist when people didn’t want to be helpful.

He wanted access to a nuclear attack sub as part of a story he was working on. This was in the late 1980s when this was happening, which happened to be when we were still in the middle of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, so letting a journalist wander around a nuclear sub was laughable at best.

Greenberg kept poking at Naval officials for access, each one basically telling him, “There is no way this is happening.” At one point he asked, “OK, if this COULD be done, who would be the one person who could allow it to happen?” It turned out to be the commander-in-chief in the Pacific, stationed in Pearl Harbor.

Greenberg got the Navy to agree to give him the meeting, which was supposed to be kind of a 10-minute, “we had a meeting” meeting. Instead, Greenberg noticed a photo of a ship on the admiral’s wall and Greenberg knew a lot about that particular ship. Instead of talking about sub access, they started talking about the boat. By the time the 10 minutes had ended, the admiral invited Greenberg to lunch and eventually granted him the permission he sought.

“Don’t take ‘No’ from someone who isn’t empowered to say ‘Yes,’” he told the group.

At the heart of his story were three key things that can be helpful to you as a journalist:

TAKE A SHOT: When Greenberg kept hearing “no,” he asked for a meeting that the people essentially told him wasn’t going to lead anywhere. In the podcast mentioned earlier in this post, Greenberg said the people setting up the meeting for him basically asked him why he’d want to fly all the way to Pearl Harbor just to hear “no” from one more person. He figured he had nothing at this point, so he might as well take a shot in person with the one person who could get him what he needed. What was the worst thing that could happen? He might have no story and a case of jet lag and that’s about it.

If the story is important enough to you, you need to take a shot at it before deciding it’s not going to happen. You never know what you might get if you give up before you give it a chance to succeed.

FIND COMMON GROUND: The thing that made this work was a bit of serendipity. If the admiral had a picture of a sunset, a poster of Porsche or a velvet Elvis on his wall, Greenberg might have not found his in. However, as he explained in the podcast, he realized he needed a connection and he found it:

They gave me a ten-minute appointment at 9:00 in the morning on a Monday. I flew up on a Saturday. I walked in to see him. He could care less about me. I was told to have a meeting. He didn’t want to be there. It was an office the size of Grand Central Station. Everybody was in their dress whites. They didn’t want me to be there. It was like a courtesy call, give him a commemorative coin and get him out.

This is the difference. You seek out common ground and I knew that I had maybe fifteen seconds to figure out what the common ground was. I got lucky because behind his desk was a photograph of a boat and it turned out I knew the boat well.

I said to him, “Is that a Bertram 31?” He said, “Damn straight.” I said, “That’s the best boat they ever built.” He said, “You’re not kidding?” I said, “Let me guess. When you make a hard right turn, the engine cavitates and the water pump overflows?” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “Here’s how you fix it. You’re going to do a bypass on the impeller.”

We start talking like that and ten minutes later, the officer is going to say, “Admiral, your time is up.” He looked at me and said, “Do you got lunch plans?” I said, “I’m all yours.”

<SNIP>

That’s called chutzpah and luck.

If I’d walked into his office for that ten-minute meeting, he’s like, “Can I go on a sub?” “Get the hell out of here.”

You want to look for ways to connect with a source during an interview. That’s why doing it in person is often so valuable. You can look around and see things that they have around them to help you size up your subject. Starting with a discussion about a picture or a plaque or even a baseball card they have on display can get you an “in” that makes them see you as a kindred spirit as opposed to a pain the butt.

GO TO WHO CAN SAY YES: I think I’m going to use that quote with every interviewing class for as long as I live now, in that it perfectly captures what we should be doing when it comes to getting key information.

“Don’t take ‘No’ from someone who isn’t empowered to say ‘Yes’” is simple, direct and yet amazingly mind-blowing, as it dawns on me that I’ve probably failed in this regard myriad times in my journalism career and my daily life.

When you want permission for something, you need to go to the person who can grant it. Unfortunately, there are often underlings, minions and other pencil-pushers who get put in your path and try to dissuade you from getting that permission. If it’s important enough for you to pursue that permission, get past those people and go find the person who is empowered to grant it.

Like many things, this can be taken too far or in the wrong way. I am in no way saying you should become the snotty person who is holding up the line at the store, loudly proclaiming, “I need to speak to your manager!” because the bananas are ringing up at 39 cents per pound when the sign clearly said 36 cents per pound. However, I am saying most folks take the first “no” as a reason to give up far too easily.

Find the person empowered to say yes and see what that person says. If it’s still “no” at least you’ll know that nobody else is getting your story. If it’s “yes,” you got what you came here to get.

Two helpful tips to help explain massive stories in 30 words or less

Many of my students look forward to the time in their journalism careers when they can move beyond the the inverted-pyramid, paraphrase-quote structure of meetings, speeches and news conferences. The idea of sinking their teeth into something much longer, more complex and multifaceted feels like a rite of passage from beginner to expert.

Most of them, however, find themselves exceedingly frustrated when they attempt to ply their trade to those bigger pieces, as it can feel like juggling Jell-O while trying to herd cats. The pieces don’t fit together right, the focus seems to drift and the overall concept of the story becomes one blurry mess.

The key thing to writing any story is being able to answer two questions:

  1. What am I trying to explain here?
  2. Why should anyone care?

That is as true for basic meeting stories (“The city council made it illegal to park on the streets overnight, which means State University students will need to find private parking and pay a premium price.”) as it is for major investigations. (“Banks were improperly incentivized and got greedy in the subprime mortgage market, leading to  risky decisions that tanked the U.S. economy.”)

I remember catching a session at a college media convention many years ago, in which an investigative journalist for a popular sports magazine told the students in the room that if they were writing a story, they needed to be able to explain it in less than 30 words.

“If I ask you what your story is about and you tell me, ‘Well… It’s complicated…’ that tells me you really don’t know what your story is about,” he said.

After the session, I introduced myself, told him how much I liked his presentation and then I pressed him a bit on the “30 words” thing. I made the point that if we’re talking about a game story or a speech story or something, I could see his point. However, the work he did? That’s got to be impossible to capture in 30 words.

“No,” he said emphatically. “You need to nail it down like that or you don’t get the message across to the readers.”

To push back, I asked him about what he was working on at that point. This was in the early 2000s when baseball was starting to sniff around the issue of steroids and performance-enhancing drugs. He was digging through records, leaked emails and other things that explained who knew what, when and where and how. He also had information on individual players, suppliers and owners who all found a way to kind of absolve themselves of the sin of cheating.

“How in the hell can you boil that kind of thing down to 30 words,” I asked him.

“As far back as the mid-1990s, players were taking steroids and everyone knew, but no one did anything because everyone was making too much money,” he replied.

25 words. Bam.

So how do you get to the point of being able to do something like that with your stories? Here are some simple ways to make it happen:

FOCUS ON THE CANDY: When we talk about basic writing and sentence structure in the book, we start with “The Holy Trinity” of noun-verb-object. The sentence starts with those three elements and then builds outward from that core. This ensures us that we’ve got the main idea at the heart of what we’re trying to say. As we add more content, it has to support and augment that, or it’s no good.

The same thing is true for when we write basic inverted pyramid stories: The lead is the essential foundation of what we’re doing in the story. Each subsequent paragraph has to support or augment that element or it needs to go away.

Writing longer and more complicated stories is no different. Just because you gathered 20 times the material you would normally gather for a simple news story, it doesn’t follow that all of that can or should be added to the piece. In fact, you want to strongly resist the urge for “notebook emptying” when it comes to bigger pieces.

Focus on the core element of what you want to say and get rid of everything that isn’t that. One of my favorite scenes from Aaron Sorkin’s old “Studio 60” show exemplifies this perfectly: Two rookie writers are trying to a sketch about the world’s worst criminal who takes hostages in a bank.

They try so hard to do so much with it, it doesn’t work. Once they essentially realize that problem, the do addition by subtraction and start eliminating stuff that isn’t about their premise. That’s where they get it to work.

FOCUS ON YOUR AUDIENCE: For generations, journalists have operated under the mantra of, “I write, you read, because I know what you need.” The fact was that the audience read the stuff or watched the stuff because they lacked for better options. When there’s one or two newspapers and three or four TV channels, well, you’re stuck with whatever is there.

Today, that’s not the case as not only do we have an almost infinite number of media platforms from which to choose, but we also have exponentially more content providers than at any point in time. The thing that’s going to make you stand out, and thus your story stand out, is understanding what your audience needs from you and then providing it in a clear, coherent and helpful fashion.

In big pieces, we try to show how everything we have gathered can affect everyone who might ever come across our work. It’s like we’re trying to be everything to everyone.

This is where audience centricity really comes into play. For WHOM are you writing this piece? What are the demographic, psychographic and geographic elements that you can use to tailor your piece to a specific group of folks that will benefit from your work?

In talking with my class the other day, we were going through the issues hammering our university right now, including an $18 million budget hole. In that, we started parsing specific audiences and what they would want to know:

  • Students care about their majors getting cut, the classes they need to graduate being available, tuition going up etc.
  • Faculty worry about increased teaching loads, the length of furloughs, the potential elimination of majors.
  • Non-academic faculty worry about getting fired, as we’re cutting about 200 jobs, and those that remain worry about what their jobs will look like after the culling.

In each case, you can create a solid focus based on the audience and then really know what your story is about. It can’t be about all of these things in depth, but it can be several stories that each focus on one key set of stakeholders and the issues that matter to them.

 

How to cover a shooting or other chaotic event as a beginning journalist (A Throwback Thursday Post)

The front page of the Daily Tarheel, the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina, captured the chaos of the active-shooter situation on that campus this week through an amazing “type-attack” approach comprised of text messages sent during the event:

The staff’s efforts on this are commendable, even as the situation that spurred their efforts has become far too common. I realized this when I typed “shooting” into the search engine for the blog and came back with far too many posts on the topic.

For today’s “Throwback Thursday” post, we go to late 2021 and go through a primer on covering shootings and chaos I put together at an educator’s request. As much as I hope it will help folks who need it, I really hope a lot fewer people will need it in the future…

 

How to cover a shooting or other chaotic event as a beginning journalist

After I ran Thursday’s post on the mass-shooting event in Michigan, a fellow journalism educator posted a note and a request:

I want to get your Dynamics of News Reporting and Writing to read your thoughts on covering shootings.
I teach near Philadelphia, the City if Brotherly Love, that surpassed an annual record of 500 people shot and killed—in 11 months. I am very sad a Temple University student returning from Thanksgiving weekend was shot twice in the chest in broad daylight by a 19-year-old who was trying to carjack him.
Whether shootings are individual or en masse, we must be sensitive to victims and families while seeking answers to curb the killings.
As I’ve said before, if someone asks for something, I will gladly blog about it, so here we go…
I teach crime reporting and breaking news as part of my junior-level reporting class, but I always include a caveat up front:

Reporting on things like shootings, hurricanes, car crashes and other sorts of mayhem doesn’t really lend itself to a lot of guidelines. I can tell you what I’ve done or what I’ve seen, but at the end of the day, how you react to something is entirely your own doing. While we can read press releases and talk about crime, you never know how you’ll react once you’re on the scene of something.

Until you’ve seen a man get pulled out of a thresher or stood 3 feet from a shooting victim’s dead body, you really don’t know how it will impact you in the short term or the long term.

That said, experience has been a pretty good teacher for me, as a crime reporter, a criminal justice editor and a student media adviser, so here is my best advice on how to work a shooting or other chaotic event for the first time.

We’ll look at what to do (or not do) during your reporting phase, your writing phase and your “afterward” phase.

REPORTING PHASE:

PRIMARY REPORTING ADVICE:

Here are two key pieces of advice when it comes to covering these types of events:

Stay Calm: Things can be blowing up all around you or you might never have seen that much blood before in your life. You may be fighting the urge to throw up. Whatever it is, you need to keep your head about you.

A panicking reporter is a useless reporter. You need to take a deep breath and focus on the task at hand.

Stay Safe: Police and fire rescue folks are trying to do their job. You are trying to do your job. Sometimes, those efforts conflict with each other. Regardless of how important you feel you are, you need to realize that their needs trump your needs at the scene of a shooting or other similar event. In many cases, they put up special tape to keep you out of harm’s way. In other cases, they tell you where to stand or where not to stand.

You need to understand that the shooter might still be out there, which can be dangerous or deadly for you or other people. Even if the shooter is dead or captured, police are likely still in a state of high tension, looking for other shooters or dangerous devices. You wandering around where you’re not supposed to be can create serious problems for them and you might be mistakenly viewed as a danger to them or others.  Adrenaline and watching too many “journalism movies” can make us feel emboldened to break the rules to get a major scoop.

Don’t.

Even when the authorities aren’t there to tell you what to do, you need to make sure you use common sense. Don’t stand up against a burning building to do your stand up. Don’t drive into a flood zone and then expect people to bail you out.

Whatever is going on around you, you need to make sure you’re safe and sound. A dead reporter isn’t much more useful than a panicking one.

OTHER REPORTING ADVICE

Use official sources when possible: When we talk about privilege in law, what we are talking about is the right to quote official sources, who are acting in their official capacity, without fear. This generally applies to judges rendering verdicts, congress-folks making proclamations from the floor and probably the pope. In some cases, it also applies to law-enforcement officials and fire folks who are working the scene of what’s going on. Relying on those folks can keep you out of trouble if facts turn out to be less than accurate.

(The law can get squishy here, so it’s always wise to check the rules.)

Even if the law itself isn’t providing you with a shield, interviewing these folks can be better than relying on witnesses or participants when it comes to the big-picture items. Regular folks get rattled when a shooting occurs or a car slams into a wall in front of them. They’re pumping adrenaline and freaking out, so their version of reality isn’t as solid as a crime scene investigator who has seen all this before. Even more, officials tend to have more of the entire picture in hand before they speak, which is beneficial to you as you try to make sense of this.

(Again, this doesn’t mean you won’t get screwed over by the officials at some level, especially if they’re hiding something. However, you can REALLY get screwed over if a regular citizen decides to accuse someone of murder on live air. Yes, that actually happened…)

Engage in empathy during interviews with those involved: Trying to interview someone who is the victim of a shooting, a bystander/would-be victim of a shooting or those who are essentially collateral damage (family, friends etc. of a victim) is a ridiculously difficult proposition.

It can feel ugly and vulture-esque to bother people who just went through a chaotic and traumatic event. In some cases, a reporter’s desire to get the story can get them to push sources for information and exacerbate the trauma. Some publications have lousy editors who lean on reporters to dig into the situation with grace and dignity of frisking a dead body for valuables.

I have had a number of interviews in which I’ve had to approach a family member or friend of someone who just died or was injured in a terrible way. In one case, it was the family of a 13-year-old boy who was accidentally shot by his best friend. In another case, it was the mother of a 17-year-old girl who died after slamming her car into a tree while drunken driving. The first family wanted nothing to do with me; the second talked to me at length. Neither was a pleasant experience.

Empathy and caution go a long way to making this less painful for everyone involved. I tell my students that we’re like waiters at a fancy cocktail party who walk around with hors d’oeuvres on a tray: We offer people something and if they don’t want it, we walk away quickly and politely.

The best example of how to think about this came from Kelly Furnas, a professor of journalism, who was advising student media at Virginia Tech during the 2007 campus shooting. More than 30 people died during an attack in which a student opened fire on campus. Furnas and his staff at the Collegiate Times had to not only cover the story, but eventually write obituaries for each of the fallen.

A quote he gave me years ago still sticks with me:

“The students I talked to were terrified of the fact that they would need to call these families and I said, ‘You don’t assume that these families don’t want to talk.’ That’s a very important thing to these families to tell the story of their son’s or daughter’s lives. That’s a very important thing. A lot of people not only want to do it, but expect to do it.”

He said the students were told to do their best and just give people a chance to speak. If they were outraged by the reporter’s questions, the reporter was to apologize and walk away.

In the end, however, very few people rejected the request for an interview, he said.

Don’t bail out on your duty to report because you are afraid of what people might say. Give them the chance to say no before you do it for them.

 

WRITING PHASE

Primary Writing Advice

The duty to report is not the same as the duty to publish: When you are working against the clock, trying to break news and pushing back against competitors and social media folks, it can feel like the weight of the world is on you to get SOMETHING out there.

In the olden days, as in before everyone could be online in 3 seconds after they saw something, we could hang on for a bit before having to produce content for public consumption. Broadcasters got the 5, 6 and 10 p.m. newscasts to inform folks. Print journalists could wait until press time to get the best version of reality, or update things between editions.

Today, you are live 24-7, so it can feel like you’re always under pressure to convert whatever you gathered into something for the public.

In the case of chaos, you need to balance that urge against your journalistic training to be accurate above all else. Fast and wrong isn’t doing anyone any good.

If you don’t have something you feel is accurate, supported and clear, don’t pump it out there and figure you’ll fix it later. You can always publish something later. Once you toss something out there, you can never really get it back.

 

Additional Writing Advice

Play it straight: You are likely living through an emotionally turbulent situation, one unlike anything you’ve faced to this point in your career. Your emotions can run the gamut of fear and anxiety to the sense that you’re about to write the Greatest Piece of Journalism Ever ™ so it’s time to shine.

There’s a reason we teach you the Driver’s Ed Rules of Journalism, namely so that when faced with something completely out of the ordinary, you can rely on your training to do things right. This is one of those times, so don’t overdo anything.

Tell the people what happened and why they care in the most direct way possible. It’s what good pros do:

A 15-year-old opened fire at his Michigan high school Tuesday, killing at least three people and wounding eight others, authorities said, in what appears to be the deadliest episode of on-campus violence in more than 18 months.

Don’t start slathering on adverbs. Don’t hype it with opinions. Don’t turn this into a narrative lead that shifts the focus toward “dig my writing” and away from what happened.

Tell people what happened in the most direct and clear way possible, based on what you can prove.

Speaking of which…

 

Stick to the facts: In the film “And the Band Played On,” researchers at the CDC are trying to pinpoint the cause of a strange malady that is killing primarily gay men. Their quest to identify the AIDS virus as well as its cause and spread had the virus  hunters relying on a simple mantra: “What do we think? What do we know? What can we prove?” Unless they could hit the “prove” stage, they refused to state something publicly with certainty.

This approach is a good one for anyone covering chaos, especially something that continues to unfold, like an active shooter situation.

If you can stick to the facts and the material provided to you from reliable sources, you can keep your readers informed and avoid spreading misinformation. If you don’t know how many people were shot, don’t guess. Don’t rely on terms like “arguably” to cover over your limited knowledge, saying things like “This is arguably the worst shooting in U.S. history.”

Say only what you can prove at the time, and that also means taking care with how you are stating something.

For example, police can say something like, “The shooter is no longer a threat.”

OK, does that mean he’s been captured? He was killed? He ran out of bullets? Also are we sure the shooter is a “he?” (Make sure in the reporting phase to check these things, as well as other details before publishing.)

Good work on the front end and sticking to what you know on the back end can lead to simple statements like: “Police Chief John Smith said the shooter, a 15-year-old male student at the school, is ‘no longer a threat.’”

 

Attribute everything you can: One of the key things you should note in the Washington Post lead was the attribution. Even though “authorities said” is vague, the rest of the story was able to fill in specifically who those authorities are and why we should trust them.

I always try to make the point that attributions are like anchor points when you’re climbing a rock formation: You might not need all of them, but it’s better to have them and not need them than need them and not have them. I also note that I’ve never met anyone who has been fired or sued for over-attributing, but more than a few people have ended up on the short end of the stick for under attributing.

When you are writing a story like this, it’s important to look at each statement you type and ask, “Says who?” If the answer is a specific person, include that in the attribution (County Coroner Jill Smith, Police Chief Doug Jones, Superintendent Raul Allegre etc.). If the information is more general, as in you got the same story from multiple people or documents, make that clear as well (Several police officers said the hallway was littered with spent shell casings from an AR-15; Court documents state Principal Helen Carter repeatedly filed reports with the district on this issue; An email chain between the boy’s parents and teachers show that while school officials were worried about his behavior, the parents said ‘Guns are part of his life, so back off.’”)

If you DON’T have a specific source or collective source, where did you get this stuff and how sure are you that it’s right? That’s where people usually screw up, because they assume they know more than they do and they fail to look it up or find a source worthy of attribution.

If you can’t find a source worthy of an attribution, wait until you can before you publish it.

 

Have someone else read it before it goes out: After you read and reread and reread something again, you can find yourself blind to your work. You also probably cut and pasted a half-dozen things in a half-dozen spots and then undid at least half of that. By the time you think you’re done, you lack any sense of what is actually in there and what you SWEAR you wrote instead.

A fresh set of eyes are a godsend in this kind of situation.

An editor or a colleague who hasn’t read this before will give you a good chance of catching things like if you swapped the name of a victim and the shooter or if you skipped a first reference to a source. It’s something worth doing because you want to make sure you’re right.

My personal stupid thing was that I always got the day wrong for every story I did. For reasons past my understanding, I always wrote that something happened Monday. Didn’t matter what day, week, month or year something happened, I always made it a Monday.

I caught a lot of those on second or third reads, but it was usually up to my editor or a colleague to ask, “Are you sure this happened on Monday?”

Again, you can’t beat a fresh set of eyes.

 

AFTERWARD PHASE

Never assume you’re done reporting: The thing about chaos is that it doesn’t operate on a schedule. It doesn’t show up as expected or finish up neatly at the end of an hour, like a TV crime drama. You have to make sure you’re frequently checking in to see what’s going on and if you’re still telling people the most accurate and up-to-date information.

Whatever was right as rain at 9 a.m. is completely wrong at 2 p.m.

The arrest that happened last night turned out to be a case of mistaken identity the next morning.

An early body count ends up being much larger or smaller than once was thought.

Assumptions become facts or become worthless as police continue to investigate.

I remember once following up on a story for a fellow reporter who had filed and gone home after her shift was done. The story was about a toddler clinging to life after falling into a creek. The whole story was about hope and prayer and this boy’s will to live. She was a great reporter and a great writer and this was one of those amazing stories she always told.

My job was “just to make sure” if something changed, so about 10:30 p.m., I called the hospital to get an update that might or might not make the paper.

The PR person was kind of half talking to me and half talking to someone nearby when I heard her say, “So… We can tell him then?”

The kid died five minutes earlier when they took him off life support.

I asked about four really bad questions, that ended up having this woman shouting at me something like, “Everything possible was done to save this child’s life!” (which sounds a lot better in print without the anger in her voice). As she’s talking/yelling, I wrote “KID DIED” on a legal pad and held it up for my editor who was across the room.

He saw it and came rushing over as I finished the interview.

“Oh shit,” he told me. “You have four minutes to rewrite the story.”

Long story short, it got done and we got it subbed in for the first edition of the paper. I didn’t get a byline, but I got a hell of an experience and a valuable lesson: Chaos doesn’t operate on your schedule. Make sure you’re constantly checking in.

Engage in self-care activities: One of the easiest things to forget when you’re in the middle of a chaotic event is that you are human and that things do affect you. The job allows you a kind of shield against feeling things or coming to grips with what you’re witnessing at the time.

Don’t kid yourself. You’re taking a beating, whether you know it or not, and you need to heal yourself a bit.

The truth is, you will see things that will gag a maggot, horrors that will haunt you for years and truly inexplicable acts that have you asking “Why?” more times than a 4-year-old after ingesting a pound of sugar. Those things DO leave a scar, whether you want them to or not. They’re there, whether  you realize it or not.

You will need to do some serious self-care activities to keep from sustaining serious damage.

This can be simple decompression things like clearing your mind or coming to grips with things you’ve seen or written. It can be talking through your feelings and emotions with colleagues or looking for things that can help you reset your mind and body.

These things can also include therapy or professional help. Acknowledging and coping with what your work has done to you does not make you weak or soft.

It makes you a human being who wants to take care of their own needs before they can take care of their audience’s.